Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting. Seurat believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music. Seurat theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism.

Chromoluminarism, also known as Divisionism, is a technique used by Neo-Impressionistssuch as Georges Seurat (1859-1891). The technique involves breaking color into its basic elements, painting in very small and regular dots. From a distance the multiple dots form an optical mixture of color. The best known example is Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886).